Building mental wellness on a foundation of strength
#WhatsHappeningInMyanmar #22222Revolution: Protesting en masse against the military coup in Myanmar—now that's bravery. The military opening fire on protesters with live ammunition—now that's cowardice. This is the same military that's been leading the charge on the Rohingya genocide. This is a powerful message, especially to anyone who take the right to vote in democratic elections… Continue reading #WhatsHappeningInMyanmar
Image by Erika Varga from Pixabay COVID sucks. Restrictions suck. But does it have to be this bad? Sure, the virus is quite contagious, and can make people very sick, but would it be different if it weren't for the covidiots? I'm inclined to think that it would be. There will always be people who choose to break… Continue reading Are the Covidiots Screwing Us All Over?
21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari was recommended to me by Nick of Fiction & Ideas after I reviewed Timothy Snyder's book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. This will be even less of review than I usually do; more of a mental chewing over what I read. The… Continue reading Book Review: 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week's term is moralization. This topic came to mind recently while reading a post on another blog. The author was making pornography a moral issue, and I wanted to do some exploring around that process of moralizing. The term moralization… Continue reading What Is… Moralization
Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness is written by Roy Richard Grinker, an anthropology professor at The George Washington University. Autism and cross-cultural psychiatry are listed as areas of expertise on his faculty page. He's the father of an autistic daughter, who he refers to a number of times throughout the… Continue reading Book Review: Nobody’s Normal
Honesty is the best policy, right? I say no, no, no, no. And let’s add on one more no, just for good measure. I would also like to propose two kinds of “honesty”, only one of which I think actually involves honesty. First, you’ve got things that can be answered or described objectively. Let's say… Continue reading Is There Such a Thing as Too Much Honesty?
In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Dr. Gabor Maté offers powerful insights into the vulnerable, human side of addiction. It draws on his encounters with patients while working as a staff physician at the Portland Hotel, an ultra-low barrier supported housing building in Vancouver's downtown eastside, Canada's poorest postal code. Ultra-low barrier housing like… Continue reading Book Review: In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts
A recent post by Shira of ShiraDest about debt forgiveness got me thinking about some of the barriers that people living in poverty face when it comes to managing their finances. So, let's consider what it might look like to be living in poverty here in British Columbia, Canada, where I live. Provincial income assistance… Continue reading Poverty Can Be Very Expensive
The emerging blogger series is aimed at community building through giving mental health bloggers who are early in their blogging evolution the opportunity to have their work seen by a wider audience. It's also a way to introduce you as a reader to some newer members of our community. This post is by RDB of… Continue reading Emerging Blogger Series: RDB (An Experiment with Vulnerability)
Every year, Google Trends releases its Year In Search data, with the most searched for terms in the past year in different countries and for different categories. Unsurprisingly, COVID-19 dominated the year in search. One of the things I find fascinating is how it's influenced our vocabulary. It's also spawned some odd phenomena, like the… Continue reading 2020 Year in Review: Google Trends
